Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  ‘If there are any Untouchables here,’ he heard the Mahatma say, ‘they should realize that they are cleaning Hindu society.’ (He felt like shouting to say that he, an Untouchable, was there, but he did not know what the Mahatma meant by ‘cleaning Hindu society’.) He gave ear to the words with beating heart and heard: ‘They have, therefore, to purify their lives. They should cultivate the habits of cleanliness, so that no one shall point his finger at them. Some of them are addicted to habits of drinking and gambling, which they must get rid of.

  ‘They claim to be Hindus. They read the scriptures. If, therefore, the Hindus oppress them, they should understand that the fault does not lie in the Hindu religion, but in those who profess it. In order to emancipate themselves they have to purify themselves. They have to rid themselves of evil habits, like drinking liquor and eating carrion.’

  But now, now the Mahatma is blaming us, Bakha felt. ‘That is not fair!’ He wanted to forget the last passages that he had heard. He turned to the Mahatma.

  ‘They should now cease to accept leavings from the plates of high-caste Hindus, however clean they may be represented to be. They should receive grain only—good, sound grain, not rotten grain—and that too, only if it is courteously offered. If they are able to do all that I have asked them to do, they will secure their emancipation.’

  That was more to Bakha’s liking. He felt that he wanted to turn round and say to the Mahatma: ‘Now, Mahatmaji, now you are talking.’ He felt he would like to tell him that that very day, in that very town, where he was speaking, he had had to pick up a loaf of bread from near the gutter; that today, there, in that very city, his brother had had to accept leavings of food from the plates of the sepoys, and that they had all to eat it. Bakha visualized himself pitied by the Mahatma and consoled by him. It was such a balm, it was so comforting, the great man’s sympathy. ‘If only he could go and tell my father not to be hard on me! If only he could go and tell him how I have suffered, if only he could go and tell my father he sympathizes with me in my sufferings, my father would at once take me back and be kind to me ever afterwards.’

  ‘I am an orthodox Hindu and I know that the Hindus are not sinful by nature,’ Bakha heard the Mahatma declaim. ‘They are sunk in ignorance. All public wells, temples, roads, schools, sanatoriums, must be declared open to the Untouchables. And, if all of you profess to love me, give me a direct proof of your love by carrying on propaganda against the observance of untouchability. Do this, but let there be no compulsion or brute force in securing this end. Peaceful persuasion is the only means. Two of the strongest desires that keep me in the flesh are the emancipation of the Untouchables and the protection of the cow. When these two desires are fulfilled there is swaraj, and therein lies my soul’s deliverance. May God give you strength to work out your soul’s salvation to the end.’

  When the crowd scattered irreverently at the end of the Mahatma’s speech, Bakha stood on the branch of the tree spellbound. Each word of the concluding passage seemed to him to echo as deep and intense a feeling of horror and indignation as his own at the distinction which the caste Hindus made between themselves and the Untouchables. The Mahatma seemed to have touched the most intimate corners of his soul. ‘To be sure, he is a good man,’ Bakha said.

  Muffled cries of ‘Mahatma ji ki jai, Hindu–Mussulman ki jai, Harijan ki jai,’ arose from the middle of the throng again, and Bakha knew that the sage was going from the platform to the gate. He clung to his position on the tree, and was rewarded for his patience by the sight of the Mahatma passing beneath him.

  A man seated on a high wooden board, with a bucket beside him, was distributing water in a silver tankard to Muhammadans in red fezes and Hindus in white Gandhi caps.

  ‘He has made Hindu and Mussulman one,’ remarked a citizen, surcharged with the glow of brotherliness and humanitarianism which the Mahatma had left in his trail.

  ‘Let’s discard foreign cloth. Let’s burn it!’ the Congress volunteers were shouting. And true enough, Bakha saw people throwing their felt caps, their silk shirts and aprons into the pile, which soon became a blazing bonfire.

  ‘Sister,’ said another citizen to a grass-cutter’s wife, who struggled in her heavy accordion-pleated skirt to take her two children home, ‘let me help you through the crowd. Give me the big boy to hold.’

  There was only one strange voice which dissented from all this.

  ‘Gandhi is a humbug,’ it was saying. ‘He is a fool. He is a hypocrite. In one breath he says he wants to abolish untouchability, in the other he asserts that he is an orthodox Hindu. He is running counter to the spirit of our age, which is democracy. He is in the fourth century BC with his swadeshi and his spinning-wheel. We live in the twentieth. I have read Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham and John Stuart Mill and I. . . .’

  Bakha came down the tree, like a black bear, and arrested the democrat’s attention by the ridiculous sight he presented. He was going to slink away shyly, but the man, a fair-complexioned Muhammadan, dressed in the most smartly-cut English suit he had ever seen, interrupted him:

  ‘Eh, eh, boy, come here. Go and get a bottle of soda-water.’

  Bakha came back with a start and stood staring at the dignitary who had called him. The man wore a monocle in his left eye and Bakha, who had never seen anything of that kind, wondered how a single glass could remain fixed on the eye without a frame.

  ‘Don’t stare at me!’ shouted the gentleman, while Bakha was wondering who the man could be, too sallow-faced for an Englishman, too white for an Indian, and clad in such fine clothes, yellow gloves on his hands and white cloth on his buckskin shoes.

  ‘Ham desi sahib, don’t stare at me,’ said the man deliberately using the wrong Hindustani spoken by the English, but becoming kinder for a moment. ‘I have just come from Vilayat. Is there a soda-water shop near here?’

  Bakha had been taken unawares. He couldn’t adjust himself to this phenomenon. So he moved his head to indicate that he didn’t know. Fortunately for him, the man’s attention was switched off to his friend, a young man with a delicate feline face, illuminated by sparkling, dark eyes and long, black curly hair, who stood next to him dressed in flowing Indian robes like a poet’s. Bakha’s inadequate answer did not, therefore, evoke the insolent flourish of the barrister’s cane as it might have done.

  ‘It is very unfair of you to abuse the Mahatma,’ Bakha heard the young poet say gently, as he walked a little way away from the two men who were now surrounded by a group of people. ‘He is by far the greatest liberating force of our age. He has his limits, of course. But. . . .’

  ‘Precisely,’ Bakha heard his companion interrupt in fluent Hindustani. ‘That is exactly what I say. And my contention is. . . .’

  ‘Yes, but listen, I haven’t finished,’ the poet was saying. ‘He has his limitations but he is fundamentally sound. He may be wrong in wanting to shut India off from the rest of the world by preaching the revival of the spinning-wheel, because, as things are, that can’t be done. But even in that regard he is right. For it is not India’s fault that it is poor; it is the world’s fault that the world is rich!—’

  ‘You are talking in paradoxes. You have been reading Shaw,’ interrupted the monocled gentleman.

  ‘Oh, forget Shaw! I am not a decadent Indian like you to be pandering to those European stars!’ exclaimed the poet. ‘But you know that it is only in terms of our bitter poverty that India is behind the other countries of the world. In fact, it is one of the richest countries; it has abundant natural resources. Only it has chosen to remain agricultural and has suffered for not accepting the machine. We must, of course, remedy that. I hate the machine. I loathe it. But I shall go against Gandhi there and accept it. And I am sure in time all will learn to love it. And we shall beat our enslavers at their own game.’

  ‘They will put you into prison,’ someone interrupted from the crowd.

  ‘Never mind that. I am not afraid of prison. I have already been a guest at His Majesty’s boarding-h
ouse with a hundred thousand others who were imprisoned last year.’

  ‘The peasant who believes this world to be maya will not work the machine,’ remarked the supercilious barrister, as he adjusted his monocle to reflect the cynical glint in his eye.

  ‘It is India’s genius to accept all things,’ said the poet fiercely. ‘We have, throughout our long history, been realists, believing in the stuff of this world, in the here and the now, in the flesh and the blood. Man is born, and reborn, according to the Upanishads, in this world, and even when he becomes an immortal saint there is no release for him, because he forms the stuff of the cosmos and is born again. We don’t believe in the other world, as these Europeans would have you believe we do. There has been only one man in India who believed this world to be illusory—Shankracharya. But he was a consumptive and that made him neurotic. Early European scholars could not get hold of the original texts of the Upanishads. So they kept on interpreting Indian thought from the commentaries of Shankracharya. The word ‘maya’ does not mean illusion, it means a series of illusions. That is the dictum of the latest Hindu commentator of the Vedas, Coomaraswamy. And in that signification the word approximates to the views on the nature of the physical world of your pet scientists, Eddington and Jeans. The Victorians misinterpreted us. It was as if in order to give a philosophical background to their exploitation of India that they ingeniously concocted a nice little fairy story: “You don’t believe in this world; to you all this is maya. Let us look after your country for you and you can dedicate yourself to achieving nirvana.” But that is all over now. Right in the tradition of those who accepted the world and produced the baroque exuberance of Indian architecture and sculpture, with its profound sense of form, its solidity and its mass, we will accept and work the machine. But we will do so consciously. We can see through the idiocy of these Europeans who deified money. They were barbarians and lost their heads in the worship of gold. We can steer clear of the pitfalls, because we have the advantage of a race-consciousness six thousand years old, a race-consciousness which accepted all the visible and invisible values. We know life. We know its secret flow. We have danced to its rhythms. We have loved it, not sentimentally through personal feelings, but pervasively, stretching ourselves from our hearts outwards so far, oh, so far, that life seemed to have no limits, that miracles seemed possible. We can feel new feelings. We can learn to be aware with a new awareness. We can envisage the possibility of creating new races from the latent heat in our dark brown bodies. Life is still an adventure for us. We are still eager to learn. We cannot go wrong. Our enslavers muddle through things. We can see things clearly. We will go the whole hog with regard to machines while they nervously fumble their way with the steam-engine. And we will keep our heads through it all. We will not become slaves to gold. We can be trusted to see life steadily and see it whole.’

  The harangue was impressive, with such fire was it delivered. Not only was the crowd moved but the anglicized Indian was silenced. Bakha was too much under the spell of Gandhi to listen intently to anyone else, and he did not follow much of what the poet said although he strained to catch his words.

  ‘Who is he?’ someone in the crowd queried. ‘Iqbal Nath Sarashar, the young poet who edits the Nawan Jug, and his companion is Mr R.N. Bashir, BA (Oxon), Barrister-at-Law,’ someone volunteered the information.

  There were whispers of consent and appreciation, but Mr Bashir’s voice rose above the others in a derisive little chuckle.

  ‘Ha, ha, ho ho! but what has all this got to do with untouchability? Gandhi’s plea is an expression of his inferiority complex. I think. . . .’

  ‘I know what you think,’ put in the poet fiercely, exciting some amusement with his brisk retort. ‘Let me tell you that with regard to untouchability the Mahatma is more sound than he is in his politics. You have swallowed all those cheap phrases about inferiority complex and superiority complex at Oxford without understanding what they mean. You slavishly copy the English in everything. . . .’

  ‘That’s right!’ shouted a Congress volunteer. ‘Look at his silk neck-tie and the suit of foreign cloth that he is wearing! Shame!’

  ‘The heredity and the environment of different people varies,’ continued the poet with a flourish of his hand to silence the rude Congress-wallah. ‘Some of us are born with big heads, some with small, some with more potential physical strength, some with less. There is one saint to a hundred million people, perhaps, one great man to a whole lot of mediocrities. But, essentially, that is to say humanly, all men are equal. “Take a ploughman from the plough, wash off his dirt, and he is fit to rule a kingdom” is an old Indian proverb. The civility, the understanding and the gravity of the poorest of our peasants is a proof of that. Go and talk to a yokel and see how kind he is, how full of compliments, and how elegantly he speaks. And the equality of man is no new notion for him. If it had not been for the wily Brahmins, the priestcraft, who came in the pride of their white skin, lifted the pure philosophical idea of Karma from the Dravidians—that deeds and acts are dynamic, that all is in flux, everything changes—and misinterpreted it vulgarly to mean that birth and rebirth in this universe is governed by good or bad deeds in the past life, India would have offered the best instance of democracy. As it is, caste is an intellectual aristocracy, based on the conceit of the pundits, being otherwise wholly democratic. The high-caste High Court Judge eats freely with the coolie of his caste. So we can destroy our inequalities easily. The old, mechanical formulas of our lives must go; the old, stereotyped forms must give place to a new dynamic. We Indians live so deeply in our contacts; we are so acutely aware of our bloodstream. . . .’

  ‘I can’t understand what you mean,’ interrupted Bashir irritatedly. ‘You are confused.’

  ‘Well, we must destroy caste, we must destroy the inequalities of birth and unalterable vocations. We must recognize an equality of rights, privileges and opportunities for everyone. The Mahatma didn’t say so, but the legal and social basis of caste having been broken down by the British–Indian penal code, which recognizes the rights of every man before a court, caste is now mainly governed by profession. When the sweepers change their profession, they will no longer remain Untouchables. And they can do that soon, for the first thing we will do when we accept the machine will be to introduce the machine which clears dung without anyone having to handle it—the flush system. Then the sweepers can be free from the stigma of untouchability and assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society.’

  ‘In fact,’ mocked Bashir, ‘greater efficiency, better salesmanship, more mass-production, standardization, dictatorship of the sweepers, Marxian materialism and all that!’

  ‘Yes, yes, all that, but no catch words and cheap phrases. The change will be organic and not mechanical.’

  ‘All right, all right, come, don’t let us stand here, I feel suffocated,’ said Mr Bashir pulling out a silken handkerchief to wipe his face.

  The crowd looked, ogled, stared with wonder at the celebrities and followed them at a little distance, till they disappeared in the unending throng of people going out of the golbagh.

  Bakha had stood aside, beyond polluting distance, thinking vaguely of the few things he had understood from the poet’s outburst. He felt that the poet would have been answering the most intimate questions in his soul, if he had not used such big words. ‘That machine,’ he thought, ‘which can remove dung without anyone having to handle it, I wonder what it is like? If only that “gentreman” hadn’t dragged the poet away, I could have asked him.’

  The fires of sunset were blazing on the distant horizon. As Bakha looked at the magnificent orb of terrible brightness glowing on the margin of the sky, he felt a burning sensation within him. His face, which had paled and contracted with thoughts a moment ago, reddened in a curious conflict of despair. He didn’t know what to do, where to go. He seemed to have been smothered by the misery, the anguish of the morning’s memories. He stoo
d for a while where he had landed from the tree, his head bent, as if he were tired and broken. Then the last words of the Mahatma’s speech seemed to resound in his ears: ‘May God give you the strength to work out your soul’s salvation to the end.’ ‘What did that mean?’ Bakha asked himself. The Mahatma’s face appeared before him, enigmatic, ubiquitous. There was no answer to be found in it. Yet there was a queer kind of strength to be derived from it. Bakha recollected the words of his speech. It all seemed to stand out in his mind, every bit of it. Specially did the story of Uka come back. The Mahatma had talked of a Brahmin boy who did the scavenging in his ashram. ‘Did he mean, then, that I should go on scavenging?’ Bakha asked himself. ‘Yes,’ came the forceful answer. ‘Yes,’ said Bakha, ‘I shall go on doing what Gandhi says.’ ‘But shall I never be able to leave the latrines?’ came the disturbing thought. ‘But I can. Did not that poet say there is a machine which can do my work?’ The prospect of never being able to wear the clothes that the sahibs wore, of never being able to become a sahib was horrible. ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ he said to console himself, and pictured in his mind the English policeman, whom he had seen before the meeting, standing there, ignored by everybody.

  He began to move. His virtues lay in his close-knit sinews and in his long-breathed sense. He was thinking of everything he had heard, though he could not understand it all. He was calm as he walked along, though the conflict in his soul was not over, though he was torn between his enthusiasm for Gandhi and the difficulties in his own awkward, naïve self.

  The sun descended. The pale, the purple, the mauve of the horizon blended into darkest blue. A handful of stars throbbed in the heart of the sky.

  He emerged from the green of the garden into the slight haze of dust that rose from the roads and the paths.